University of Alabama students begin organizing Hobson City records

HOBSON CITY — The nine University of Alabama students on Friday morning sat at plastic tables in an unused room of the old C.E. Hanna Elementary building now serving as Town Hall, surrounded by a daunting task.

                                

Cardboard boxes stuffed with old municipal records lined the walls and encircled the tables. A haphazard pile of yellowed maps and blueprints sat near the front of the room.

The graduate students, part of professor Michelle Robinson’s English composition and rhetoric class, spent much of Friday combing through those boxes, sorting the contents according to subject, and placing them into other boxes designed to preserve paper. The group took direction regarding which records should be kept and what could be destroyed from two archivists from the Alabama Department of Archives and History; they say it’s not uncommon for small towns and counties to need the sort of help the students offered.

“Cities and counties often don’t have money for records-keeping,” said Tom Turley, a government records archivist who’s been with the department 25 years.

Before the students dove into Hobson City’s records, Turley and his colleague, Becky Hebert, gave them a crash course in which municipal documents must be kept forever.

In Hobson City’s case, that would be minutes from Town Council meetings, or ordinances passed by councils, but those records seemed to be few and far between.

“A lot of this, we’re sorting so they can look through it,” Hebert said. “Most of it could be destroyed.”

Parking tickets, court dockets, arrest reports and narratives of crimes taken down by Hobson City’s police from the late 1970s through the 1980s filled many of the boxes.

Mayor Alberta McCrory said Friday those boxes hold “all of the remaining records” the town still has.

Over the years, documents have been lost. When Town Hall moved to the school building, “a lot of stuff was left” at the old building, she said. Much of what was left behind was never recovered.

What Hobson City does possess, professor Robinson’s students will catalogue over Friday’s and two more visits to the town.

“We’ll see how far we get in those three visits,” Robinson said Friday, as her students worked to bring order to the room.

One of those students was Justin Vaught, a 23-year-old working toward a master’s degree. He wore cotton gloves meant to protect the papers he’d be handling.

Vaught “hit the jackpot,” he said, finding a folder containing notes, cost estimates and drawings for a redesign of Hobson City’s park from the ’70s.

“If you’re an archival researcher, this is pretty cool stuff to come across,” he said.

Vaught found the old notes interesting, enjoyed sorting through the musty cardboard boxes.

In another corner of the room, Ph.D. student Ted Kijeski rummaged through a box of accounts payable and cancelled checks — “not very exciting stuff,” he said.

Kijeski, 49, pointed to another box, one marked “cultural (non-municipal),” that he and other students were using as a catch-all for items they couldn’t quite classify.

Inside: a “weekend marriage license,” void two days after its issuance, printed with the words “have a ball.”

“We think it was probably someone goofing off around the office,” Kijeski said.

He and the rest of Robinson’s students have three days to do what Turley said could take a month.

Even if the students are successful, Hobson City has no one charged with keeping track of the old records, so what’s to stop disorganization creeping back in?

McCrory said the documents, once sorted into the labeled boxes, will be moved to a different room at Town Hall and arranged on shelves. Residents will be free to inspect the documents, if wanted.

“When people are interested in anything, they could find that information,” the mayor said.

Hobson City received federal grant money to organize its records several years ago, Turley said, administered through his department.

But funding for recordkeeping has in recent years become tenuous, Turley said, with the U.S. Congress attempting to cut federal money for such grants and the Alabama Legislature reducing state matching money to only $32,500.

“Most local projects only get $2,000 to $3,000 each,” he said. “Money is always the big issue.”